Tomboy

 

Writer director ~ Céline Sciamma, 

France, 2011

 

Ten-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran), seeing her chance when her family has to move due to dad’s work, presents herself as a boy to her new neighbourhood friends.

Céline Sciamma talks of ‘Tomboy’ being in part like a thriller, and indeed it is as the threat of Laure’s deception being discovered that powers the drama. We see her watching the boys play football and assessing the possibilities, how she can mimic that budding masculine bravado and rough-and-tumble. They already know her as Michaël so all options are open. But at home, she’s so sweet with her younger sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), and these scenes are mostly the core of the film for being so touching and natural. Where Laure-Michaël is most at ease, probably. She’s not trying to run away from anything: it’s a loving home. She’s just exploring identity.

I have seen criticisms that the film doesn’t fully delve into its issues, but the open-endedness means it’s a film that opens the questions without judgement. Is Laure-Michaël transgender, non-binary or gay or simply boyish in a world that prescribes rigid gender roles and regulations? It is a testament to the successful androgyny that the film solidifies in Laure-Michaël that when forced to wear a dress, it just looks wrong on her. When mum reprimands her, it is for the deception rather than hint of transgressing gender roles as in ‘Pelo Melo’. There is no sense her family will reject her: that’s not where the tension is.

Orla Smith writes: “Things get more complicated when adults and Mikhael’s peers discover how they’re presenting themselves and take objection to it, a disruption of the peace and happiness Mikhael experiences before bigotry came into play.” But even here, I am hesitant to attribute their reaction primarily to learned prejudice rather than outrage at the deceit: that’s not fully how it struck me.

Certainly the scenes between the sisters are the most disarming moments because little Malonn Lévana is so amusing and charming as only young children can be. Sciamma’s triumph is in giving the kids enough space to be themselves. For example, the scene where the sisters are playing a “Guess who?” game, lying in bed, is so raw and unaffected that it is a surprise to hear it took three takes. The glee Jeanne takes in harbouring and even toying with the secret she’s been entrusted with is both delightful and suspenseful (will she be able to keep the secret??).

It’s all filmed in the bright sunshine of A Lost Childhood summer, but it isn’t troubled like ‘Summer 1993’, or unforgiving and heart-wrenching like ‘Pelo Melo’, or a pastel-hued memory as in ‘Pain & Glory’. It has a similar buoyancy and affinity for its age-group as ‘We are the Best’, but ‘Tomboy’ is even more lowkey in aesthetic. It effortlessly catches the everyday bubble of amusements of children at play, but its questions about character and identity are foremost and sympathetic. Without answers or judgement, it conveys the mysteries and confusion of forming individuality, and speaks empathically to that moment when children are wondering just what they are amongst their peers, let alone the adult world.

Custody

‘Jusqu'à la garde’

 – Xavier Legrand, France, 2017

This is a follow-on from Legrand’s 2014 short film ‘Just Before Losing Everything’ (‘Avant Que De Tout Perdre’ – whose trailer easily taps dread), which I had not seen and did not know of, so I was in the same position as the judge at the beginning of ‘Custody’ that presides over the case. “Which of you is the biggest liar?” she asks, and indeed I wasn’t sure either. At one point the possibility that the son was actually playing both sides seemed open to me. But it’s not those particular mind-games that the film is ultimately interested in playing (indeed, the trailer commendably keeps an air of ambiguity). 

Rather it is the psychological and the emotional tensions of weekend visits with dad that are most at play. Anyone who was a kid caught in an uncomfortable divorce – not even abusive – can relate to the excruciating experience of feeling trapped in a car with a difficult parent. And making you feel all this tension is Thomas Giora as Julien, who, in an all-round impressive ensemble piece, is exemplary. As the son, he doesn’t get to say so much, but it’s his experience that mostly guides the film and he expresses a lot, letting all the emotions flicker over his face as we watch him suffer and internalise stress as he wonders what he should do. The restraint and naturalism that permeates the film avoids making Denis Ménochet as Antoine – Julien’s father – just a cartoon villain: he plays the victim in embarrassing and frightening displays of self-pity, and he lashes out from time to time, but the tension is waiting to see just how far he’ll go. His swings between moderation and control and victimhood and hints of violence keep everyone on screen and in the audience on edge. He is recognisable and mundane in his moodswings and manipulations and this makes him far more recogniseable and troubling than a more incarnation of aggrieved masculinity like ‘The Stepfather’. Wendy Ide writes, 

Once you see him as a threat, you can’t unsee it. This is not a problem with Ménochet’s performance necessarily, rather a consequence of the narrow timeframe that focuses on the final crash and burn of family relations. But it does become a challenge to see the man behind the monstrous grudge.

But that’s maybe the point: the monstrous grudge is all Antoine chooses to be. When vengeance and grudge narratives are so culturally dominant, here is a reminder of the shocking pettiness when this carries over to mundane reality. This drama of wounded people trapped in emotional turmoil bears the tone of Andrey Zvyagintsev and bears the same sense of people emoting without everything being revealed and obvious. And then, the film slides into horror.

If anything is the raw stuff that the horror genre draws from, abusive family dramas are primary sources. All those Ids, all those monsters, all that feeling of helplessness: horror thrives on these elements and they are fundamental to painful domestic environments. All that trauma. All that potential for violence. If ‘Custody’ says anything it is how the commonplace miseries and disputes of our lives can descend into true horror. We have only to turn to headlines and friends to hear such stories. The question may be does the film use horror motifs or does genre obtain its motifs from such moments? A film like ‘Cape Fear’ turns up the genre aesthetics whereas a film like ‘Elephant’ keeps a step back, undoubtedly horrific but tethered to underplayed drama. ‘Custody’ is dour and restrained without being depressing, because the thriller tensions are always the undercurrent. It manages to stay quiet for the length before turning it up when all the previous screw-turning makes the whole thing cave in. It’s a masterful play and makes this a drama that is not likely to be shaken quickly.

Kings and Queen

'Rois et Reine' - Arnaud Desplechin, 2004, France

Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘Kings and Queen’ looks the part: it is well performed, occasionally funny, looks slick, looks good and feels breezy. It also demonstrates what happens when a film's character's become increasingly annoying.  It runs on two parallel stories of a woman Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) about to remarry, suffering the terminal illness of her father and trying to get her ex-husband to adopt her son. The ex-husband is Ismael (Matthieu Amalric), a viola player who spends his time battling authority figures, being contrary and insufferable and getting committed to a mental health hospital. 

The film is too long and so gradually exposing that there is less to these characters than their emotional outcries and tics. The script runs on Ismael’s arrogance and intolerable behaviour and Nora’s grief and reflections. At first, we might believe there is something righteous or motivated at the former, and something touching and revealing about the latter: then it becomes apparent that the emotional motivation of the relationships depicted in the film are driven by faux-angst and that there will be nothing to truly interrogate the behaviour and narcissism of our protagonists. Empathy wanes as more and more whimsy and scenes are thrown on top of one another.

When we find that there is nothing but boorishness and pretension to Ismael, that he has not really been misunderstood much at all, then his forced incarceration seems sensible enough. He would probably think it justifies his denunciation of the world and people around him and therefore his immaturity. He is not proving a thing. The film is also tiresomely flippant about the relationship between mental illness and the artiste, that the artistic sensibility must be irresponsible and irrepressible, that any conflict with reality and accountability can only result in frictions of ‘insane’ behaviour. His scenes add up to less and less. Finally, there is a funny but deeply irrelevant robbery attempt on his father’s store: it’s a highlight, but it amounts to nothing.  

When we find that Nora is actually a egotistical bore, whispering to her first husband (well, they marry after he dies, but…) that she is his “nightmare” into his ear as he sleeps, driving him to a spontaneous and successful suicide attempt… it is then that we find that the touching hospital scene where Nora dreams a conversation with him (in a gentle style that reminds me of the films of the Taviani brothers) was in fact built upon bad self-indulgent theatre dramatics. Oh, how young tortured love drives le artiste to express himself with impromptu Russian Roulette! And when the saddening and affecting tale of Nora sitting with her father through his terminal cancer culminates in her father’s deathbed condemnation of her egoism, one wonders where it sprang from. She’s problematic but she is hardly Betty Blue. Is it just that the script wants to have him talk about how they seduced one another (no, not incestuously but poetically) and how he wishes she would die rather than him, that he will die with hatred in his heart for her or to know what it amounts to. It is hard to locate the foundations of this hatred: is it in his complicity in covering for Nora over her first husband’s death? Is there an abundance of condemnably selfish conduct that she exhibits that we do not see?  

What seems to be at stake is the welfare of Elias, Nora’s son, who drifts tokenly in and out occasionally. Nora says he is the centre of her world, and it is hard to doubt she thinks so, but she spends most of her time finding someone else to take care of him. What is it that she does? Her little gallery? Is this a problem of the privileged that can afford such things? He seems to have been taken care of mostly by his grandfather, who when in a sickly state she decided not to bring Elias to see: this being more to do with her suffering and repulsion at the old man’s condition. Then the boy is sent to friends. Then a nanny gets mentioned. Elias does not like his new stepfather, so Nora’s solution is to have Ismael adopt him in a plan that does seem remarkably selfish and irresponsible. We are to take it that Ismael was good with Elias when he was married to Nora and yet truly one would not trust Ismael with a pencil sharpener. Elias himself is precocious and seemingly palmed around and yet impervious to the inane self-absorption of the adults. When this overarching theme comes to its conclusion, Ismael takes Elias out around some museum to tell him that he will not be adopting him and to waffle on a bunch of meaningless pretentions and pointless posturings which, again, have less to do with anyone else other than Ismael himself. 

Overlong, over-indulged, well performed and presented; nevertheless any emotional poignancy disappoints in the egotism of the characters and the failure of the script to cross-examine and explain their behaviour so that their self-absorption and this production means something. 

The Last of the Crazy People

Laurent Archard, France, 2007

French film directed by Laurent Achard, based on Canadian Timothy Findlay's novel ‘The Last of the Crazy People’ (‘Le Dernier des fous’ a.k.a. ‘Demented’): a coming-of-age story set in a dying little rural farmhouse where 10 year-old Martin watches his family as it’s besieged by poverty, repression, isolation and madness. Kind of. The trick upon reflection is that no one seems legitimately, technically "mad", but rather beset by a fierce mixture of despair and unfulfilled longing has driven some to apathy - the father - and others to distraction - the mother and brother. And whatever Martin is thinking, how he is filtering these experiences, we aren't too sure. Young Julien Cochelin's face is impassive and ungiving, making Martin quite an abstraction; it's a shock when a single tear quietly rolls down his cheek. His face remains so blank that it could be considered non-acting. He wanders around, all elbows and awkwardness, looking for morsels of affection. Around him, the adults give brilliant performances that fall just short of indulgent, bringing out the real tragedy of their inability to communicate successfully with one another. Martin is the opposite of his brother, Didier (Pascal Cervo), whose emotions both good and bad explode everywhere with the gusto of a wannabe poet. Dominique Reymond is the pale, elegant reclusive mother, screaming the house down in the middle of the night. Only the warmth of the maid keeps the family together.

 

The Gothic trimmings are always welcome, most glaringly the mother as the Madwoman in the Attic and a sense of perpetual decay. It looks like a provincial idyll, beautifully framed, leisurely paced so that small details of the kitchen and the courtyard can be relished. Small gestures mean everything: the boy at the table football nodding to the girl; mother's stare back at her son so fixed, it looks like a freeze-frame. It's somewhere between the bleakness of Hanake and the dour humour of ‘Koktebel’. It is this that prevents the story from falling into the pornography of wretchedness, although as soon as a gun is introduced, all mystery evaporates. A gun is often cheap drama because you can tell pretty much how it's going to end up as soon as you see one. And when it finishes as you thought, you realise there was nothing new here, that no extra great leap was made, and that beautifully judged as it was, that's a shame.

Nevertheless, I am a sucker for this kind of rural dystopia, and although inferior to, for example, the thriller narrative of ‘I'm Not Scared’ or the chilling ‘Olivier, Olivier’, ‘The Last of the Crazy People’ succeeds as a minor but engrossing melodrama.

     

2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle

Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967

A film that is more essay than cinema? A film that could be referred to by any outsider to confirm the stereotype of Continental cinema as a litany of smoking, pontificating, posing, and smoking; of studied indifference and existential angst. (Yes, I put smoking twice).

An essay: everyone speaks with the same voice. This is the voice of Jean Luc-Godard himself, whispering a worried narration (perhaps annoying, this whispering, like a politicised fly buzzing and fretting in your ear as the film plays); the "I" of the title. Every character speaks in this voice, with these very same concerns and contributing to a homogenous viewpoint; they stop in their everyday routines to tell us, the audience, a thought or biographical sentence about themselves, without emotion, perhaps wanly; but mostly they are lost in introversion and existential reflection. Existence, objects, consumerism, detachment, female faces, globalisation, war, famine, fashion, and naturally: sex. People talk to one another as if in mid-seminar, relating to one another and the world around them only as concepts, themes, objects. Others sit in cafes reading random quote from a mountain of novels as if in mid-performance art.

Paris: the "her" of the title, the city being built up even as Godard narrates his concerns and characters reflect his insights. Buildings. Constructions. Erections. Civilisation. Prostitution. Parisian.

"An article which appeared in the Le Nouvel Observateur relates to a deep-rooted idea of mine. The idea that in order to live in Parisian society today, one is forced, on whatever level, on whatever scale, to commit an act of prostitution in one way or another, or to live according to the laws that govern prostitution." (dvd booklet, pg. 46)

Non. We do not truly learn anything of Paris. We do not learn from this essay what it truly means to "prostitute" oneself. We do not learn what it is to be a wage slave, trapped in one or two jobs just to feed the children. We do not feel the humiliation of a secretary having to literally "give" herself to her boss in order to keep her job. We do not see a scenario in which a man is so consumed by work that he loses all connection to his family. That kind of thing. The kind of "prostitution" on display here is closer to a dalliance, a detached flirtation with the idea of the apparent oldest profession in the world defining everyday bourgeois existance.

Pose: gorgeous French female portraits and profiles glamorise the screen. Women light up a cigarette, because they want to, and they air their existential ruminations to camera. Dour, smoking, very ’60s, disaffected, continentally bored. Marina Vlady is Juliette Jeanson, a housewife who defines herself in one word: indifference. A housewife that turns to prostitution. A housewife who, when putting her kids to bed, suddenly stops for the audience - as her son bounces on the bed full of life, to reflect - "What does it mean to know something?" Which brings us to:

Humour: unintentional? Formal? Deliberate and satirical? The young son (young enough that you think he might only have just managed to get beyond "Le Petit Prince") tells his mother of a dream he has had about twins that merge into one person, which has a preposterous punch line: "And then I realised that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united." His later recital of his homework about friendship and whether it is or is not possible between boys and girls is equally deadpan and hilarious.

And then there is the gratuitous moment of a woman having her bath interrupted by a gas meter reader who just wanders in. Pure farce. Or the apparent "crèche" run by an old man who keeps reminding the amorous couples in the adjacent rooms that they have only a few minutes left.

Or the visit to the hotel by Juliette and her friend for a bit of naughtiness with a journalist running from the experience of Vietnam, a scene that offers two choice moments: first: Juliette - in a moment of disconnected reflection as the girls undress and get to work for the journalist - sits by a lamp, says to herself and the audience, "Paris is a mysterious city," and poignantly turns the lamp on "…asphyxiating…" and off "… natural…" and on and off; and the man says, "Why doesn’t she come over?" as if oblivious to her moment of artiness, to the fact that she is breaking through the wall between actress, character and audience. And Second: the journalist - wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it (!!) - has the women walking back and forth undressed with Pan-Am and T.W.A. flight bags over their heads. Absurdism to puncture the veneer of suffocating consumersim and circumstantial and literal prostitution, non? C’est comedie!!

Despite the loose-limbed New Wave feel, there is no accommodation of the trivial, of the simply pleasurable, of the inconsequential to mitigate this dissertation on Paris and prostitution 1967, and therefore unintentional humour may seep in. The 10 year-old says "Mummy, what is language?", to which she answers, "Language is the house that man lives in." Yes. Yes that is how such inter-generational conversations between such characters go. The austerity and the very un-likeliness combined is amusing.

Essay and pose: There is no story, no emotional core, no real bracing neo-realism, just nice clean imagery, sharp alluring colours, and a wonderful, bright ‘60s feel. This is not Bergman, whose metaphysical and existential concerns are merged near-seamlessly within story and characters. This is not even Goddard’s "Le Petit Soldat" (1963), a polemic married to a fragmented but recognisable story. Here, there is only Godard, rejecting narrative, spoken from whispers on the one hand and attractive women on the other. Aside from the compelling portraits of pretty faces, there are wonderful moments where the size and unknowability of the cosmos and, indeed, of the unknowable itself, are captured in close-ups of a swirling coffee, or a burning cigarette. Then there is the bustle of urban life distilled in the busy editing of the garage sequence. A sketchpad of contemporary angst in a nice, bold modern binding, complete with funny doodles. Composition and colours are often resonant of comic book panels (see Drew Morton).

Let me end with a confession. Let me ask what is the truth of my opinion about "Two or Three Things I know About Her…", how has it imprinted itself upon my privileged, lofty, detached judgment? Let me say that I am amused. I don’t necessarily find it profound, but it is entertaining as a cinematic dissertation. But I am more a Francois Truffaut kind of man.

My "favourite" horror films of the last 5 years... (2005-2010)

Having been given this challenge by a friend of mine, I was surprised to find I got my list up pretty quickly. The list soon overran, but let's go with the primary ten first:

"Let The Right One In" (2009)
"Martyrs" (2009)
"[.Rec]" (2007)
"The Descent" (2005)
"The Orphanage" (2007)
"Ils/Them" (2007)

"The Mist" (2008)
"The Road" (2009)
"Hansel & Gretel" (2007)
"Halloween" (2007)

And then/Honorary mention:
"Wolf Creek" ("2005")
"Vinyan" ("2008")
"The Hills Have Eyes" (2006)
"Dek Hor"
"28 Weeks Later" (2007)

What do I divine from this list? That 2007 was a bumper horror year. That I really dig the grimy neo-realism of the Twenty-First century extreme horror wave. That a lot of "video nasty" era trimmings are now mainstream. That I really like the fairytale horror aesthetic too. I'm not big on happy endings either. ...Also: I think I missed some good Asian horror and probably a bunch of under-the-radar b-horrors I missed also, the kind you would stumble upon in the golden era of the highstreet video store.

I believe that "Wolf Creek" was also better than its detractors say. Half the films in the list above have key problems, but few films don't. I have seen "Hansel and Gretel" accused of a thin story (not really), and "28 Weeks Later" has calamities triggered by dumb character behaviour, but... well... sometimes a film is good enough for allowances and forgiveness to be given. For example, "28 Weeks Laters" injects a welcome seriousness and attention to mounting fear that push it beyond its formula; plus an opening that may well bustle for "fantastic opening sequence" position with "Dawn of the Dead" (2004).

"28 Weeks Later" comes from my 'fun horror' pile, and I note that there is not enough from this pile that made the list; modest films that I felt transcended its format through execution and gusto (No, I wouldn't count "Zombieland" and "Shaun of the Dead" appears to be 2004; "30 Days of Night" (2007) is enjoyable enough but ultimately evaporates upon reflecction). This "fun pile" has little to do with humour and more to do with the enjoyment of genre tropes well presented. "The Mist" starts and runs as fun and - though there are plenty who did not like it - that ending shoves it off the deeper end into something far more troubling and vital. More fun: The "Orphanage" scores for having a couple of scenes that genuinely gave me the scares and having a genuinely heartbreaking explanation at the end... like "Hansel and Gretel", it overcomes weaknesses through beautiful execution and simple allegiance to the ghost story, moving into pure storytelling. "Hansel & Gretel" could very well be in a tie with "Dek hor", an equally creepy/sweet and beautifully executed ghost story.

Not since "The Blair Witch Project" has hand-held camera felt so vindicated and brilliantly utilised as in "[.Rec]", a point-of-view stance that dragged the viewer deeper and deeper until backing itself into a corner of the genuinely nightmarish. It also allowed for wonderful long takes. An excellent formal approach at the service of the genuinely scary unfolding zombie tale (and you can keep your "Cloverfield"). "The Descent" had a similar shrinking into a nightmare-space trajectory, and ended up a bizarrely emotional experience, seeming from out of nothing more than the standard monster movie dilemmas - something so few manage.

Blahblahblah "torture porn", etc. "Martyrs" and "Ils" took few prisoners. Both felt infused with genuine social awareness, commentary and outrage - especially "Martyrs", whereas contenders such as "Frontiers" felt forced and probably hollow and "Shaitan" felt ultimately undernourished. Both "Martyrs" and "ils" were scary for different reasons.

"Haut Tension" felt like a good con trick, but a con trick nontheless, but director Alexandre Aja scored better with me with "The Hills Have Eyes"; perhaps not as 'clever', but a more straightforward, gruelling, silly and grimy remake of the Craven original that holds up well as a nasty piece of gore-and-scares.

My feelings towards "Halloween" remain: it will stand future scrutiny.

Yes, I am calling "The Road" a horror film.

I suspect "Vinyan" could well find weakenesses in one of the top ten and take it's place; upon reflection the film reveals strength and strength and odd places for the ghost story (yes?) that feels pretty damned original and authentic.

As a mixture of post-modern horror and pure story, "Let The Right One In" is sublime. The horror genre at the height of its abilities. I need say no more.